"It will have to do." Unconsciously, her mother glanced across the room to the locked drawer where the cheque lay, signed and payable to Stephen. Jill drew away slightly. She clasped her hands round her knees, with a sombre face, staring down at her mended shoes and a darn in her stocking. "Then I can't go." Her voice was hard. "I won't wear that old frock. It's so tight over the chest I can hardly breathe." She bit her lips. Mrs. Uniacke, watching her, wavered. "You could make a fichu, couldn't you? I could find you a piece of lace, perhaps--and add a frill?" Jill scowled. "Sounds like an early Victorian picture." She rose to her feet. "With a crinoline and black mittens--thanks, awfully. I'll tell Judy the party's off." This was the mood her mother disliked--slangy and impertinent. So she summed it up to herself, resenting her daughter's manner. "It's entirely your own fault if you do. I am quite prepared to help you, Jill. We could easily alter the frock between us. It isn't as if you were really 'out.'" Jill gave her a quick glance. "I could make one myself for thirty shillings--I know I could. And it isn't much. I haven't had a new dress this year..." Her grey eyes were wistful. "It can't be done." At this fresh attack Mrs. Uniacke's mouth tightened--"there's Roddy to think of beside yourself..." "To say nothing of Stephen's expenses?" The words escaped Jill against her will. Little she guessed their significance, but Mrs. Uniacke flushed crimson. For a moment she could have boxed Jill's ears. "That will do." She turned away and, with hands that shook, took up her work, leaning over the torn skirt, her back turned to her daughter. Jill closed the door behind her. She stood for a moment on the stairs, her dark brows drawn together, her mouth a narrow scarlet line. "Oh!" she said--"I'd like ... I'd like----" she stamped her foot--"to _murder_ Stephen!" PART III "Flower o' the peach Death for us all and his own life for each." CHAPTER XIX McTaggart lay on the golden sands of Viareggio, warming himself, lazily, like a lizard, in the sun. Before him stretched the broad, unbroken curve of the bay, a dazzling sheet of sapphire blue, save where the white "Molo," like a slender finger pointed from the basin of the docks, where the shipping yards lay, and masts and spars went up in a cluster of spear points, dark against the sky. His eyes followed the line of the pier to the lighthouse at the end and wandered off through the haze to the distant shore, where a group of cypresses clustered, sombre and grim, like sentinels stationed, guarding the land. The dark, tapering trees in the brilliance of the sunshine held a hint of sadness like the presence of a grave; appropriate to the scene where that spirit of fire and air, the poet Shelley, had been sacrificed to the waves.